fredag 28. november 2014

We are soon entering Advent, a season for songs
and carols. I’m very fond of the musical traditions of Christmas and its songs,
both those of my native Norway, the ones more typically found in Britain or the
general songs, carols and hymns belonging to the Catholic repertoire of Western
Europe. As a prologue to this season, I’m posting a carol from the fifteenth
century which from the onset has very little to do with Christmas. I have taken
it from R. L. Greene’s Early English Carols
(Oxford 1977), where it is listed among the satirical carols, although
thematically it could just as easily have been listed among the carols of
mortality. The text comes from Bodleian Library. MS. Eng. Poet. e. I, and is
written sometime in the fifteenth century. The lyrics of this carol belong –
albeit loosely - to a very old tradition of Christian admonitory verse where
the relationship between the soul and the body is scrutinized, sometimes in the
form of a dialogue. In this particular case, however, the focus is less on the
moral lesson, as it is a warning against fellow men, yet it contains elements
typical of the cultural environment in the immediate centuries after the Black
Death which I have elsewhere referred to as the cult of mortality. In order to
emphasise this connection, I’ve chosen a rather macabre illustration.

In the following I have standardised the lettering as opposed to how it is
printed in Greene 1977, but otherwise I have made no changes to the text.

﻿

Three living and three dead MS Harley 2917, Book of Hours, Use of Rome, France, c.1480-c.1490Courtesy of British Library

tirsdag 18. november 2014

Self-castrating beaverRoyal 2 B VII, English psalter, between 1310 and 1320Courtesy of British Library

In a recent blogpost I wrote about a description of beavers found in Historia Norwegie,
an anonymous Norwegian historiography from the twelfth century. This
account repeated the ancient myth that beavers castrate themselves to
escape hunters, a myth perpetuated throughout the medieval period and
still alive in the sixteenth century when Ludovico Ariosto wrote his
Orlando Furioso. In
Ariosto's epic poem we find another reference to this zoological
factoid, which I will present in this blogpost.

Seemingly a less successful beaverFrom the same as above

To
understand the employment of the beaver-myth, some background is
necessary. The context is a series of challenges that disrupt the
pagan camp during the siege of Paris, which is the dramaturgical nave
around which the episodes in the poem revolve. Four pagan warriors
are challenging each other to duels on account of various offences
that go against the chivalric code, and the pagan king Agramante has
arranged for the order of their duelling. As one of the first
combattants, the Tartar king Mandricardo is armed and prepared, aided
by Gradasso, king of Sercania (a region meant to be in modern-day
China). As Gradasso is about to conclude his office as Mandricardo's
page, he finds that the Tartar's sword is Durindana, which belonged
to Orlando. Unbeknownst to Gradasso, Orlando left his sword in the
wilderness along with his armour and his horse when he went mad after
learning that the princess Angelica whom he loves has wed the Moorish
footsoldier Medoro. The sword was found by the Scottish prince
Zerbino whom Mandricardo killed in order to get hold of it.

In
Orlando Innamorato by
Matteo Boiardo, the precursor of Ariosto's work, we are told how
Gradasso has set in many resources to acquire this sword, and Ariosto
gives a quick summary of events, as quoted below. When Gradasso sees
the sword he gets infuriated and demands to know how Mandricardo came
by it.

Somewhat more successful beaverSloane 3544, English bestiary, 13th centuryCourtesy of British Library

Seeing the sword, Gradasso had no doubt

This was the weapon which Orlando won.
To claim it back Gradasso had set out

With a great fleet; and no more
splendid one

Had ever left the East; he put to rout

The kingdom of Castile; he had then
gone

To France and was victorious; and
nowThe Tartar has it and he knows not how.

As readers, or listeners, will know,
this story is not true and Mandricardo fabricates events. The
fictitious account is of course very insulting to Orlando or anyone,
since he is likened to such an unchivalrous beast who is not only a
prey for hunters, but who also commits such an unmanly deed as
self-castration in order to preserve his life. This latter point is
perhaps of greatest importance, since by leaving his sword behind Orlando has abandoned his primary chivalric attribute. Furthermore, since I hold Ariosto to be no less a shrewd metaphorician than Shakespeare, I feel safe to say that by comparing Orlando to the beaver, Mandricardo draws attention to the phallic symbolism of Durindana.

mandag 10. november 2014

The
Scandinavian effort in the history of the Crusades is an aspect often
overlooked in the more general overviews of this movement, which was such a
central feature in medieval Christian thought. However, academics have recently
paid much attention to the crusades launched by Danes, Swedes and Norwegians,
and there is currently exciting research being done about the Swedish crusades
in the Baltics, and the Norwegian king Sigurd Jorsalfare's (c.1090-1130) sojourn
to Palestine from 1108-11. That Scandinavian monarchs and noblemen took part in
the crusader movement is only to be expected, as this was an aspect of kingship
virtually every Christian ruler had to take into consideration – whether to
participate, to fund or to stay away from it.

Three knights, illustration pictureMS Royal 20 D II, Roman de Tristan, France, c.1300Courtesy of British Library

In
this blogpost, I wish to present two descriptions of how Danes responded to
calls for crusade, as recorded by authors outside Denmark. The first
description is taken from the short crusader narrative Profectio Danorum in Hierosolymam, “The leave-taking of the Danes for Jerusalem”.
The book recounts a joint Danish-Norwegian crusader expedition prompted by a
papal call for crusade following the loss of Jerusalem in 1187. The author of Profectio is now believed to have been a
Norwegian Augustinian canon, and the work was likely written on the behest of a
member of the Danish high clergy or nobleman some time after 1192.

As the title suggests, the book is predominantly concerned with the journey to
the Holy Land, not the crusaders’ effort in the war against the Muslims. This
is because the crusaders came too late and arrived in Palestine after the peace
treaty had been signed and the Third Crusade was over. This may have caused
some embarrassment to the surviving participants, and the author of Profectio goes to great lengths in
depicting the hazards at sea and death by drowning as the crusaders’ imitatio Christi. Profectio is in many ways an
interesting book, and I hope to return to it in future blogposts. What concerns
me here, however, is the author’s representation of the piety of the Danish
nobles, and their response to the papal call to arms which they received at Odense
during King Knud’s celebration of the Nativity. The following excerpt from
chapter IV is a translation from the Norwegian by Astrid Salvesen:

Ship with a cross - has nothing to do with crusade in its literary contextMS Egerton 3028, Roman de Brut, 2nd quarter of the 14th CenturyCourtesy of British Library

The king and all
those who sat around him then started to weep and moan so that they could not
speak a word, and so deep was this great sorrow that not one of them was able
to give a reply. Finally they came to themselves, breathed more slowly and
broke the silence – such often happens when one learns of grand and unexpected
events. But they had to be encouraged and exhorted before they could agree on
who should answer these messengers, who were as splendidly dressed as their message
was tragic.
This kind of lachrymose piety is repeated a couple of times as some of the
nobles renew their commitment to the crusade, and the author is careful to
depict his protagonists as true Christians. As suggested above, this depiction
was perhaps all the more needful in light of the crusaders’ ultimate failure to
provide help.

Crusaders reaching the their destination, but not too lateMS Royal 19 D I, Historia de proeliis, translated into French, France, c.1340 (after 1333)Courtesy of British Library

A
rather different, more tongue-in-cheek depiction of the Danish response to a
papal call for crusade, can be found in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, written in the
1120s and -30s. In the fourth book of his work, William is chiefly preoccupied
with the first crusade and he commends the efficacy with which it was preached.
As a measure of its effectiveness, he includes a short summary of the effects
it had on the remotest corners of Latin Christendom.

Then the Welsh relinquished his woodland
hunting, the Scot the intimacy of his fleas, the Dane his continuous drinking,
and the Norwegian his raw fish.- From Gesta Regum Anglorum, Book 4, chapter
348,
my translation

Indeed, for these inhabitants of Christendom’s peripheries to give up their
favourite pastimes and nourishment, the call for crusade must have been very
powerful.

Crusaders, possibly as lost as our Danish-Norwegian protagonists from Profectio MS Royal 16 G VI, Chroniques de France ou de St Denis, France, after 1332, before 1350Courtesy of British Library

søndag 2. november 2014

I'm
a medievalist, and I'm often reminded of why the
study of history is important. To me it's about challenging grand
narratives and comprehending human diversity, to unlock the vast
complexity of human experience and to remind both myself and those
around me that the past is not easily grasped and that we see history
through a glass darkly. Historians are not here to bring comfort to
those content with a simplistic view of times past and the historical
progress. Historians are not here to sustain grand narratives, but to
challenge them, to complicate them and, to the needful extent, to
falsify them. That this is important is to me quite evident and I
don't question this importance - nor do I need to, because I'm very
often reminded why such constant revisionism is necessary.

To
illustrate this necessity of historical studies in the manner of
medieval didacticism, I want to present a very recent exemplum of
historical misunderstanding. This took place on a Facebook page
dedicated to my home place, a small village in the Western Norwegian
fjords. There was an on-going discussion about the history of one of
the place names, and during this discussion some very strange remarks
about Norwegian history came to light, uttered by one of my fellow
townspeople (henceforth called Mister G). His comprehension of the
Middle Ages in Norway was wildly erroneous, and serves as a good
example of the kind of historical misunderstanding that one can find
when history is marked by a certain grand narrative.

Olav Haraldsson's death at Stiklestad by Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831-92)

This is one of the most important events in the old Norwegian grand narrative

From Wikimedia

The
purpose of this blogpost is to present the way in which Mister G
misunderstood Norwegian history, and to illustrate how much it is
possible to be wrong about a historical period. In order to do so, I
will first give a brief overview of twelfth-century Norway with a
focus on the key points of the discussion I had with Mister G. Then I
will present his version of Norway in the Middle Ages. The discussion
took place on a Norwegian public forum, but I don't wish to mention
names or to quote at great length, especially because the man in
question will probably not be aware of this blogpost and can
therefore not answer. The few quotes I translate, will only serve to
emphasise a point of importance.

Olav Tryggvasson is made king of Norway by Peter Nicolai Arbo

Olav Tryggvasson is another iconic figure in the old Norwegian grand narrative

From Wikimedia

Overview
of twelfth-century Norway

By
the beginning of the twelfth century, Norway was a unified kingdom
under its own kings. Ecclesiastically it was a part of the
archbishopric of Lund together with Sweden and Denmark, which had
been fairly recently separated from the archbishopric of
Hamburg-Bremen. This was the case until 1152/53 when the the churches
of Norway and Sweden were loosened from the archbishopric of Lund and
organised under their own archbishops, respectively situated in
Nidaros (modern-day Trondheim) and Uppsala.

Up until this
time we know very little of the literary production in Norway. Sagas
of Norwegian kings were being written in Iceland, although these are
now lost to us. These works were written in Old Norse, then commonly
referred to as the Danish tongue, with the Latin alphabet brought to
Scandinavia by missionaries at some uncertain time. Runes were also
used for shorter messages, and these were common all over the Norse
world, including parts of England where Norse influence was strong.

The
first Norwegian literature has been conjecturally dated to the early
1150s, and the first work is believed to be a Latin hagiographical
account of Olaf Haraldsson, the saint-king who died at Stiklestad and
who was the patron saint of Norway. Shortly after, probably in the
1160s, the first Norwegian Latin chronicle was written, Historia
Norwegie,
and towards the end of the century we also find books in Old Norse
written in Norway. One of these is a history of Norwegian kings
called Ágrip
or Extracts
by modern scholars, which is likely composed c.1190. Another one -
often referred to as our oldest book - is the Old Norwegian Homily
Book, written c.1200, containing a number of homilies, most of which
appear to be translations of Latin texts. Although these texts were
written in the vernacular, there were only small differences -
so-called Norwegianisms - that made them distinguishable from texts
produced in Iceland or Denmark, for instance.

Much of Norway's
history in the twelfth century was marked by civil strife as various
pretenders to the royal throne fought each other. Towards the end of
the century, Sverre Sigurdsson reigned the kingdom after the defeat
of King Magnus Erlingsson in Nidaros. King Magnus had been supported
by Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson (governed from 1161 to 1188), and
because of this there were periods of conflicts between Sverre and
the ecclesiastical powers. This resulted in Eystein's exile in
England (1180-83) and the exile of his successor Eirik in Lund
(1190-1202). For this policy, Sverre was excommunicated by the pope.

This
very brief survey covers the main points about which Mister G
harboured a severe misunderstanding. His own version of events
follows suit.

King Sverre crossing the Voss mountains

Peter Nicolai Arbo

From Wikimedia

Norwegian
history as it never happened

The
underlying concern that sustained Mister G's version of Norwegian
medieval history, was Norway's exceptional place in the history of
Scandinavia. His first historical claim in the debate was that Norway
had its own written language around 1120, "200 years before
Sweden and Denmark". He went on to say that all people of
knowledge - presumably about the written word - and all the writings
disappeared during the Black Death.

This is, as we can see
from the survey above, spectacularly wrong, and I challenged him on
these points, pointing out that Norway shared a written language with
the rest of Scandinavia, and that we had a Latin literature. I did
not, however, press him on the particularism evident in his remark
that Norway was two centuries ahead of our neighbouring countries.

His reply to my comment on the written language, was a slight
but very minute modification of his claim. He said that "it was
beyond doubt" that Norway had its own written language c.1150,
and he added that this "was many years before Sweden and
Denmark". The support for this claim was that under the reign of
Sverre Norway parted ways with the Catholic church and its Latin
mass. Instead, we "went over to" the English church which
unlike the Catholic one held mass in the vernacular. He went on to
say that this was a process that had been going on since 1066 when
King Olav Kyrre made an agreement with William the Conqueror not to
attack England. The impossibility of this agreement can be seen in
the fact that Olav Kyrre became king in 1069. However, this
impossible agreement resulted over hundred years later - if I
understand his timeline correctly - that Norway joined the English
church. He furthermore said that this was something Sweden and
Denmark did not like to hear about after having ruled over Norway in
various periods, and the underlying claim seems to be that Sweden and
Denmark are envious of Norway's ecclesiastical liberation from Rome
at a time when they themselves were still Catholic.

So, in
short: In the 1100s, Norway got its own written language, and this
took place two hundred years before Sweden and Denmark. By the end of
the century, Norway split with the Catholic church and went to the
English instead, as a result of a process that had been going on
since 1066, following an agreement between William the Conqueror and
a king who would not be king for three years. This particular
position was something of which both Sweden and Denmark are very
envious.

The Battle of Stamford Bridge by Peter Nicolai Arbo

Three years before Olav Kyrre became king of Norway

From Wikimedia

There
is very much at play here. The most glaring issue is perhaps the
repeated insistence on Norwegian particularism, that our history is
so widely different - and even centuries ahead - to the histories of
Denmark and Sweden. This is an idea that burgeons from a deep-rooted
current of historical interpretation in Norway, and it comes from the
fact that for centuries - ever since 1397 - Norway has been ruled by
kings from Sweden or Denmark. This lack of historical independence
put its mark on Norwegian historiography in the 19th century. This
was a century during most of which we were governed by the Swedish
king after having been handed over from Denmark in 1814 following the
outcome of the Napoleonic wars. Norway's secondary role in the
politics of the kingdom led some historians to seek comfort in the
past, and the perhaps most spectacular result of this was the claim
by Ernst Sars that Sweden and Denmark had been populated from Norway
in prehistoric times. Mister G draws from this ideological current in
his insistence on Norway's exceptional role in the twelfth century,
and although the political milieu that gave force to this current in
the 1800s now is gone, Mister G is swayed by the very same
little-brother-complex that haunted some of Norway's historians in
the 19th century.

There is also another current feeding the
ideas of Mister G, namely the Protestant distaste of anything that
smacks of Papism. After Norway's reformation in 1536/37, Norwegian
Lutherans eventually adopted the historical interpretation moulded
and sustained by Protestant anti-papist propaganda. This
interpretation of history was very strong and ubiquitous in
Protestant countries, and perhaps most accessibly found in the great
English epics of Edmund Spenser and John Milton. This current
remained strong through centuries, and in the first draft of the
Norwegian constitution in 1814, Jesuits were, along with the Jews,
denied access to the kingdom. These restrictions were revoked later,
and from the 1860s and onwards Catholic missionary work no longer
needed to be clandestine, resulting in the first modern Catholic
churches to be built at the turn of the 19th century. Nonetheless,
despite the gradual acceptance of Catholics, the historical
understanding on which Mister G relies has marked Catholicism as
something negative. This is why Mister G is so adamant in his
insistence on Norway not being Catholic after the twelfth century,
and which is why he claims Sweden and Denmark appears to be ashamed
of their prolonged Catholic past.

Håkon the Good and the farmers at the yuletide offerings at Mære

Peter Nicolai Arbo

From Wikimedia

The
Cost of Historical Blindness

In
the grand scheme of things, Mister G's excessively erroneous
interpretation of Norwegian history is fairly innocuous. His belief
in Norwegian particularism is unlikely to cause harm to anyone, and
it has not found a violent incarnation in him. However, the belief
itself is thoroughly disturbing and potentially damaging if it is
adopted by younger people, or people who exert some kind of influence
in political or social matters. I don't for a second believe that it
will have nationwide ramifications on a grand scale, the Norwegian
public consciousness is too tolerant for that to happen. But it might
instil in some people a sense of entitlement, a sense of pride that
can lead them on to a path towards increased nationalism and make
them dismiss the needs of those from other countries. In a globalised
world where millions of people are in dire need of help, and where
Western countries have a moral duty to receive refugees, it is
necessary to counter ideas of particularism and to fight chauvinism
that might prevent people from obtaining a life in safety on the
grounds that they don't belong to a country's particular, exceptional
historical journey towards the fulfillment of its destiny. The kind
of historical misunderstanding embraced by Mister G, is the same kind
of historical interpretation that creates a gap between one country
and the rest of the world, and in a time of perverse consumerism and
increased selfishness throughout the west, we can't morally afford
that kind of particularism. No country is alone in the world, and a
historical understanding that leads people to think this is the case,
is a historical understanding that must be challenged, countered and
falsified.

Om meg

Norwegian medievalist, bibliophile, lover of art, music and food. This blog is a mixture of things personal and scholarly and it serves as a venue for me to share things I find interesting with likeminded people.